Through opportunities presented by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries and through my firm, I was able to attend the American Association of Law Libraries conference this year.  I learned some things and met a bunch of great folks, including Sarah Mauldin, Director of Library Services at Smith, Gambrell & Russell LLP who inspired this post.

I have talked about “Phone a Friend” in past tips, more than once.  While I haven’t specified reaching out to contacts in other jurisdictions, it is worth a research tip mention.

You can find excellent contacts, and make friends …

While email attachments are frequently used to share documents between lawyers, law firm staff, and clients, they are also one of the most common delivery mechanisms for malware. While most messages that have infected attachments will be stopped if your anti-malware software and/or spam filter are working properly and updated, some will make it through. For this reason, staff and lawyers at every firm should follow should follow these two simple rules:
1. No matter how interesting or enticing they appear to be (e.g., jokes, celebrity gossip or pictures), never open attachments from strangers.
2. No matter how interesting or …

♫  I’ll tell you simply I’m fallin’ for you;
I’ve never felt this way before…♫

Lyrics, music and recorded by Sara Hickman.

(click image to enlarge)

Continuing our discussion of getting to ‘Inbox Zero’ this second post in the series of posts dealing with email is about SimplyFile – an intelligent add-on to Microsoft Outlook (2007 or 2010).  Of all the ‘tips’ that I put forward doing “60 Tips in 60 Minutes” type presentations, this is the one tip for which I receive the most feedback.  I use it all the time on my PC and I didn’t realize …

Research issues can be very specific – either in the time period for information or in the minutia of the topic. For those questions, the commentary material near to hand may not have your answers. Today’s tip shares some approaches.

• Look at reissues or recently released encyclopedias (the CED, Halsbury’s Laws of Canada)
• Look for legal news articles (Lawyer’s Weekly, Canadian Lawyer, Law Times)
• Look at bar association or law society newsletters (CBA National)
• Look at law blogs (lawblogs.ca)
• Look at law journals and topical journal publications (I use the Index to Canadian Legal Literature first and

Creating a long, unique, complex (letters in upper and lower case, numbers and symbols) and random password for every service you use is the best practice standard when it comes to using secure and strong passwords. If you follow this advice however, your passwords will be an unreadable mix of letters, numbers and characters. While good for security, they will be hard to remember.
As a solution, consider using a “passphrase” to remember complex passwords. A passphrase is a mix of letters, numbers and characters that has a translation that makes it easier for you to remember the correct sequence. …

Ah, it’s that hallowed eve when the law goblins come out to play, wreaking  havoc and terror wherever they go.  

They may keep us up at night.  They can even cause our insurers to quaver. 

There are many nightmares you could encounter when you visit The Haunted House of Legal Horrors.  

So beware the darkness, my friends.  

Don’t say we never warned you – one of these things happened to a friend of a friend of mine….  

• Remember that guy who called you once in 2010, but hung up on you before you got his name? Well his Statement of

Emond Montgomery Publications, a respected Canadian Legal publisher, has a super resource available (with a free login and password) for going from a legal word to sources of legal commentary.  It is found on the EMP website using the “Click for free legal glossary” link in the site header to get to the Glossary of Legal Terms.

Unlike many legal dictionaries, the terms are not just defined, or defined using judicial decision references, rather the definitions are derived from within the catalog of Emond Montgomery Publications.

Following the source links under a definition will net you possibilities for purchasing …

The search functionality on many websites is dismal, and in sometimes it is non-existent. If you are looking for something on a specific website and can’t find it, don’t despair, Google comes to the rescue.
You can use Google to search within a specific website by preceding your query with “site:SpecificSiteURL” [substitute your URL and don’t use the double quotes]. For example, to find the retainers on the practicePRO site, type “site:practicepro.ca retainers” in the Google search box [don’t include the double quotes].
You can also search within a specific type of site by doing the following: “site:edu …

♫ I let it go and now I know
A brand new life is down this road…♫

Lyrics and Music by: Avril Lavigne, Chad Kroeger and David Hodges and recorded by Avril and Chad.

To paraphrase an old saying, everyone talks about how their inboxes are overflowing but no one actually does anything about them.  Well, almost anyone that is.  I had a conversation with my colleague and friend Debbie Foster at the Pacific Legal Technology Conference  earlier this month and she told me she has a policy of never leaving her desk at the end of the day …

Yesterday I whined a little about how hyperlinks and convenient search tools may be making for lazy researching. Today’s Tip is a reminder about how to search for judicial consideration of a statue section without using those convenient tools in CanLII, Quicklaw and Westlaw .  If you are looking for cases that consider section 119 of the Health Professions Act, RSA 2000, c H-7 you could use the legislation note up shortcut tools that are provided with your favourite service OR you can search within any full text case law database with this formula:

“name of act” /10 #

Stated …